FSU: For Sale University

Now that FSU has fully bought into the Koch Foundation’s teachings of economics, I thought it prudent to look into the nature of those teachings. The Foundation website (www.cgkfoundation.org) gives little insight into their Market-Based Management program that is taught to associates, except that free-market ideas are taught through – “reading topics and discussions [which] cover the philosophical underpinnings and practical application of MBM, including classic texts from F.A. Hayek, Thomas Sowell, and Ludwig von Mises.”

Hayek, Sowell and Mises would have us cede to big-business; all governmental health, education and welfare programs, leaving only the military and Supreme Court in the hands of bought-and-paid-for career politicians. These three take umbrage at We The People for wanting to use what we together already own for the common good, instead of buying them from private enterprise. Too much free enterprise however is just as destructive as too much government.

We already give away our oil, only to buy it back from greedy oil companies. Are we to also give away our schools and government health insurance programs, only to have to buy those services back from for-profit companies? Privatization of public services puts enormous profit into private hands. Our environmental and food safety laws were passed by The People to help protect us from being exploited by unscrupulous private enterprise. Are we to lose them too?

It wasn’t that long ago when we each grew our own food, made our own clothes, built our own homes and traveled about using only the energy of a stout horse. Today, we work for someone else, taking wages to buy back the goods and services that come from the efforts of our own hands and minds. Another difference is that we pay someone a profit for that privilege.

How did it come to pass that one hour of our toil for another’s benefit is no longer worth that same one hour of toil in return for our benefit, such as corporate CEO’s, investment brokers or bank presidents whose salaries we help pay?

Where will be that safety net if we should fall ill, become unemployed or homeless?

F.A. Hayek wrote in his book, The Constitution of Liberty with regard to a safety net, that he was prepared to tolerate “some provision for those threatened by the extremes of indigence or starvation, be it only in the interest of those who require protection against acts of desperation on the part of the needy.” In other words, our own government would function not to protect us from exploitation; the government would protect the exploiters from us!